Come on over!

I’m partial to one side of the street in downtown Holland, MI.  I’ve tried the other side, but really, I have no interest in it other than looking in at the seniors eating bagged lunches at the downtown retirement home.  Brown paper lunch bags are fantastic in their own right, but I also slow my gait and people-watch the elders as they watch me.  I like the messaging that’s packed into a senior citizen.  They’ve seen everything come and many things go and, with each one you may or may not have a gold mine of experience, a fortune cookie message that you might save in your wallet or leave on the table.  I don’t know what age you have to reach to employ the Q-tip hairdo, but if it’s bold enough to tackle my straightness I will embrace the halo of white fuzz as my own.

That's it?

In the meantime, I usually walk on the non-retirement side of the street.  I counted 40 storefronts between my house and the one coffee shop that makes me feel like people live here.  Out of the 40 storefronts, eight of them are empty. For effect, I’ll repeat this fact in a different, generalized, and therefore slightly inaccurate form that highlights the economic downturn: twenty percent of the stores in downtown Holland, Michigan are empty.  The feel of a barren corridor of previously Papyrus font-laden establishments is particularly enhanced on Sunday, the day when nothing is allowed.  I went out to breakfast this morning and found myself excited as we pulled up, simply because the place was open.

My norms might be shifting and I will be the first to tell you I’m a bit delirious, but I still know a winner when I hear one.  On the radio station that used to wake me up with sub-par humor but has switched to all Christmas music, all the time as of November 1, I heard a radio contest this week where the winner was to be awarded one dozen frozen pigs in a blanket.  One dozen, frozen, pigs in a blanket – might as well throw in a whole chicken and can of hairspray.

The potential joy of the arbitrary will keep me listening to the Christmas music for another 40 days.  Pigs in a blanket can overcome pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.  Why is the unexpected refreshing?  Why does it take the unexpected to show us the obvious?  What is the most unexpected item I could put in a brown paper bag?

On Tuesday I had the best Mexican food I’ve had in Michigan in Florida.  A conference for work brought me to the strange land I like to call Orlandio.  I haven’t been anywhere exotic lately so I survive on the thrills of extra “i’s,” the occasional “la” preface and rolled “r” for special effect. I asked my hotel clerk for a good restaurant within walking distance and she described something that sounded like an Applebees.  More excited for the walk than the food, I almost set foot out the door when she clarified that though it was technically with walking distance, I would have to cross a highway, four lanes in each direction.  Details.

I turned to my friend Yelp for some good Orlandoian cuisine recommendations.  Surely I’d find a hidden gem that I could brag about tomorrow.

When IHOP comes up in the top five restaurants in your area, it usually signals that it’s time for some self-reflection.  Instead, I decided to investigate the person that took the time to leave a thoughtful review of said IHOP.  Incidentally, Carlos took his family there on Christmas one year, and they all got candy canes.  He’s also rated several other IHOPs (many have food on par with each other) as well as an A&W (they have good root beer), a Ramada Inn (the jacuzzi is watched over like a hawk by the receptionist), and 94.9, the local radio station that hosts the Delilah show (she’s got all the lovers tuned in).  Carlos can you hear me? You are fascinating. I won’t find a place for dinner by reading your nearly 400 reviews, but I will find myself re-energized by humanity.

Halloween Mexican decor in Holland, MI. Note the healthy ceiling tiles.

In the depths of Yelpers lacking the texture of Carlos I found Garibaldi Mexican Cuisine, and thought it would be fun to go there alone, eat alone, and be the only person in the restaurant.  The self-reflection bit started to kick in and I was wishing Carlos had come along.  Driving back to the hotel I was struck with the state of Orlandio.  Crap stores shaped like giant shells selling crap.  Back to back overbuilt establishments hawking cheap plastic trinkets and 4/$5 tshirts suck up against one another form corridors of crap.  It’s daunting and disheartening but also reaffirming and recharging.  As designers we have a responsibility to make meaningful products out of quality materials. The crap parade has to end.  I’m surrounded by cheap signs flashing at me in the night with weird emo songs coming from the radio.  If I was in a movie this would be the opening scene. I’m a stranger, lonely in a run down city at night.  And then, “PLEASE TAKE A RIGHT TURN, FOLLOWED BY A…CONTINUE TO FOLLOW THE ROAD.”

Hertzina (I call her that because my dad calls her that) is the GPS.  She talks to him.  Tonight she’s talking to me. The voice that jars the rest of us out of our self-stardom fantasies soothes my dad.  He’s liked computer voices for as long as I can remember.  “Good morning, Paul,” says his laptop in a warm tone only a robot can deliver. “Good morning,” he replies.

The rows of strip malls remind me of an overworked field that needs to lay fallow for a year or more to regain some nutrients.  Naturally, this brought me to stop at a Friendly’s.  The smell inside was almost unbearable, but I had a black raspberry cone anyway. I was living the life.

In 2004 I was also in Florida, and also semi-detached from reality.  I arrived in the panhandle (that’s in the central time zone FYI) the day after Bush won re-election.  I didn’t understand how as I hadn’t moved to Michigan yet and didn’t realize that Republicans existed, and proceeded to probe the issue with the people that worked the Navy base that we were using to set up our equipment.  Post-election probing doesn’t work.  I went to sea on our research boat and deployed instruments that took microscopic pictures of the sand on the bottom of the sea bed.  The waves picked up and I started puking over the edge.

I bet Carlos was at IHOP.

When you wander the streets of quaint towns like Holland, MI, you overhear things being said in the local language.  Most of these words are recognizable, but recently I heard a squawk of a word that should come with a warning.  Both parts of this word come with the flat A sound merged with a number of Y type noises.  Cover the ears of your children and say it with me: backtrack.

Beyehcktreyeck!

This kind of lust is for sun only.

I find it odd that someone in the town planning committee didn’t yell ‘backtrack’ when the they decided to roll out the town visual identity signage.  Conservative but suggestive – wow! This might be a spicy place after all.

Words like backtrack make me wish I knew more about linguistics.  Actually, I wish I knew more about a lot of things, or that I, at the very least, retained info that I know I used to know.  Have you ever opened up an old notebook from school and marveled at the type and scope of information you once retained?  Why, body, have I decided to forget useful back of the envelope math and instead decided to retain the memory of standing bent over in the middle school girls locker room, waiting patiently as the passive-aggressive gym teacher counted my vertebrae to make sure I didn’t have scoliosis?

This rainy, Michigan weekend is devoid of sunlight.  On one hand, I finished my indoor skateboard and now my bare feet can grip soft leather like never before.  On the other hand, the gods at Hulu keep trying to convince me that I’ll dance awkwardly and my eyelids might darken if I would only take

The internet thinks I would take a pill for 16 weeks for this...

Latisse.  Who wouldn’t risk permanent eye pigmentation for the chance at creepy eyelashes?

Can an ad be an ad without letting me know it’s an ad?  Will we ever get to the point that advertising is something I crave? As much as I like saying the word ODST, I’ll never play Halo.  I will, however, quickly succumb to any number of user experiences.  Tease, embed, dangle, lust, tactile, grasp, assume, embody…a stream of consciousness that I dare you to use on me.

It’s raining.  Can I get scoliosis from sitting on the couch?

I’m an asterisk.  Last week I arrived home from a great trip to San Francisco and moved around the house in slow, heavy stomps.  Walls quivered as I leaned on them, faucets sweat as I gripped them, and couches groaned as my croaking mass of influenza lay sedentary for eight days.

I never got tested for H1N1 for a couple of reasons, all of them unacceptable.  First, since I’m new to this area, I haven’t found a doctor yet.  The thought of actually finding a doctor when you’re sick is daunting, and when you’re healthy, it’s boring.  I lay on the sofa sweating and the only doctors that I could think of were those that practice sedation dentistry.  Second, if I did have swine flu, I didn’t want to have to tell people I had it.  The new girl has swine flu. It would have ruined me at recess.  I will remain neatly tucked inside one of the sixty degree angles in the asterisk of H1N1 total cases.  If you read me in eight point font on the bottom of the page you’ll find out that I’ve done my part to widen the error bars for epidemiologists.

Don’t blame me, blame feta cheese.  It all began on my trip back from San Francisco when I boarded my delayed and twice switched flight from Chicago to Grand Rapids with a Greek salad I grabbed at O’Hare.  United smooshed me in a middle seat but with only 24 minutes of flying time I didn’t really care.  I ate what I thought was an innocent meal quietly in the darkened aircraft as we waited to push away from the gate.

The flight attendant walked slowly down the aisle and did a double take at our row.  She looked at me, “can you lift up your salad?”  “Lift it up?” I slowly raised it a few inches above my lap.  She leaned down in slow motion and took a big, strong, SNIFF.

“Yep, It’s your salad!”  She exclaimed while executing a perfect ‘bend and snap’ recoil for the now quiet aircraft that contains six of my new co-workers scattered about.

“Excuse me?”

“Your salad.  Your salad smells like throw up.  Someone said they thought they smelled throw up, but it’s your salad. The throw up smell is coming from your salad.”  Her proclamation was crisp each time she rephrased it.  I was sitting face to face with one of the life opportunities that you look back on with a thousand good things you could have, should have done.  Not wanting to ruin the moment the way she had ruined my dinner, I unbuckled and stood up half way in my chair:  “Don’t fear folks, it’s just feta.”  Silence.  At least I’d tried.

I ate a few more bites of throw up salad before closing it and shoving it in the seat pocket.  The short flight meant they didn’t come around to pick up trash, so I carried the scarlet letter off with me in a great display of not making eye contact with others.  The next day I was stricken.

I measured my recovery by my ability to compute.  I read no emails for three days and took another to write short replies that said I’d actually reply later.  As of last night I was looking for Super Mario Brothers emulators.  I watched three grainy clips of Michael Phelps, looked for more, and then it dawned on me.  I was better.

I’d like to see an online diagnosis tool that determines your level of illness based on the type of computing you can tolerate.  I’d also like to see a full size sculpture of that flight attendant bent at the waist, nose leading the way, made entirely out of feta.

Apparantly, nobody sculpts in feta.

On Friday, I was the only person in the security line at Gerald Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, MI.  There still was a line though, because the woman reading the x-ray scans had yet to lose her diligence. My two computers, jacket, shoes, and two bags formed quite the queue for her to analyze, but I was fine with the extra time standing around in my socks as they were a great shade of teal and the floor looked clean and made the color pop.

My mental attitude was A+ with gold stars, high five.  I had just presented my California driver’s license as my form of identification. Maybe ‘they’ wouldn’t know I actually live in Michigan now, and only have 6 more days before my California registration runs out and I need to get a new license plate that will force me to blend in with the rest of my new state.  For that very moment I was securely a Californian, albeit one that can’t seem to locate the title to her car in order to change said registration, but that’s a worry for next week.

How long does it take to form an affinity to a new place? Michigan isn’t home, but I live in a fantastic apartment that is a great home.  I don’t look like Michigan yet, but my newness allows me to see what Michganders look like.  Yes, Michiganders is the correct word, synonymous with Michiganians. I feel a pressure to continuously exploit and overlay my life experiences on top of my new life, but that life isn’t mine yet. I’m a perpetual visitor, and it’s exhausting.

Maple-bacon donut by Dynamo Donuts. Photo by Yelp user Jonas T.

Is it comfortable and easy, then, to arrive back in San Francisco and take up ‘real life’ again? Quite the opposite.  It makes me drink obscene amounts of coffee. It makes me eat eight glorious meals a day.  It makes me eat donuts.

I pass a store that I once might have frequented weekly or monthly and a guttural panic pressures me to pound pastries and pizza.  “If I don’t eat it now, I won’t get a chance at it again, maybe for months.”  I look like a seagull with the face of a human.  I am a visitor again, in a place that used to be home.  Yesterday, I had coffee from three different places, plus breakfast, brunch, a bloody mary, and a bacon donut all before noon. For good measure, and my current pursuit of building skateboards, I also bought four super-soft pieces of leather for my indoor boards.  Is there anything more satisfying than bare feet on leather?

I love this city because it’s over-stimulating, and full of people that are always ten steps ahead of you in every dimension.  You can touch anything and smell anything and taste anything, and that’s not always a great thing, especially in the Mission, but it is nourishing.  Cities will continue to push and drive design simply because everyone has already thought of everything.  Ideas don’t always have to be world changing…DEEP BREATH between bites!

Cities revel in fantastic examples of the next small thing.

With that, I slide into salty specs of bacon on fried cake with maple icing.

As part of its plan to emerge from financial ruin and regain more of its former customer base, United Airlines gives very special treatment to its formerly Premier passengers.  Yes, It places us in the back row of tiny aircraft, smooshed into the half-seats that accompany this fine machinery.  Seats 17B and 17C straddle the even more emaciated aisle, and the flight attendant straps herself into a jump seat that pulls down in between to block the bathroom, that instead of running water, has a big bottle of generic Purell gel sanitizer.

If I turned my head to the right, I could smack the flight attendant a big wet one on her cheek.  The proximity of her face to mine and the gentleman in 17C is enough for both of us to make our own uncomfortably awkward jokes, neither of which approaches advanced beginner on a comedy scale.  If this proximity isn’t enough, she pushes the discomfort one more notch up to a dark brown toast as she delivers the entire round of pre-flight announcements from this position.

Find someone that is sitting near you right now.  Sit side by side so you warm to each others body temperature.  Make sure your partner’s face is no more than four inches from yours. Now,  bring a microphone to your mouth and tell a story that everyone in the vicinity has heard before.  Are you mature enough for this experience? Please report back.

with the sweet sweet scent of lavatory in the air, smooching might be an option...

I look around our packed aircraft and sigh because I believe that flying has lost all of its glamor. In reality, I have no idea. In my head air travel was once all martinis, silver, supple leather, jaguars, and fur-lined hoods, Now we sit in CRJ 700s, round bodies splurged next to one another so that if you popped the roof off the plane and flipped us over we’d be a nicely formed human Jell-O mold.  Jiggle jiggle.

I’m flying from Grand Rapids to Chicago and on to Boston.  My reading material is stranded in my gate-checked bag but I can take in enough by reading the headlines of the USA Today of the man sitting in front of me through the crack between the seats.  I exhaust each page faster than he does because he has the luxury of seeing all of the text.  He’s doing a great job of dominating his air space.  Flying may not be glamor, but there is no argument that it’s not sport.  An elite athlete in the sport of economy-passengering is trained at jumping into line at the earliest possible time for his or her boarding number, manipulating overhead bin space without making eye contact with others, and maintaining the largest sphere of air around his or her seat via body position and reading material.  The USA Today man has played his seat mate for a chump and it’s clear who will not have a place on the podium.

To cap off this fantastic experience, the flight attendant reads off connecting gate information for more people than are on the plane.  Why does she bother?  Do you ever not double check this information once you enter the terminal?  Aside from glorious Virgin America, is anyone experimenting with the flying experience?

It’s now the arbitrary time to shut down electronics.  It’s also my cue for moisturizing my right cheek.  Just in case.

I woke up this morning and decided to take on my day by watching three episodes of Greek on Hulu because I was too hungry to make breakfast.  Next, I remembered I had no milk so I watched a fourth episode.  Last week I discovered a bagel store with a breakfast sandwich that is edible if you know to substitute Swiss for the default American cheese.  We should be ashamed, America. I wish I had a bumper sticker that says: Not my cheese. My car is one of the last remaining cars on the road, save the cars in Santa Cruz, CA, that can sport bumper stickers at all.  Just last week I peeled a faded “I brake for penguins” off the rear end of my Jeep.  The disrobing left a naked black rectangle that is in such crisp contrast with the rest of the vehicle that I think I might coat my body in bumper stickers next time I don’t want a sunburn.

The woman in front of me in the bagel store was digging through her change purse looking for loose change that would sum up to the price of a coffee because she felt bad using her credit card for such a small purchase.  I waited patiently with my headache and cramped Hulu neck and finally the cashier decided to help me while the woman proceeded with her digging.  I specified my Euro-cheese presence and ordered myself, and the woman who now had around sixty-five cents, an old fortune, and the perseverance of an over-achiever strewn across the counter, a cup of coffee.  Then, I paid with my credit card.

First edition print of "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" by Gordon MacKenzie. Ugly dolls (including handmade child, Aqua) for scale.

While drinking what was prematurely tepid coffee, I played Pac-Man on my phone but wished I could muster just a smidge more effort to pull out the copy of “Orbiting the Giant Hairball” by Gordon MacKenzie I had in my purse.  This isn’t any old copy of “Hairball,” it’s a first edition copy that a coworker let me borrow.  Its supple leather binding, frayed canvas cover pages, and interspersed slices of notebook paper are a tactile senstation.  At some point, I will start reading.

Instead, I cracked open my new Xetoc notebook.  Xetoc is my go-to brand for small (4×6) notebooks.  I use Pearl spiral bound and Kunst & Papier cloth bound for large (9×12) notebooks.  Sometimes I attempt to merge other notebook brands into the rotation because trying every pen in the art store stones me into purchasing paper, but inevitably I give up on the impostors and go back to my regulars.  I purchased this particular Xetoc in June at my first visit to The Container Store, an establishment I’ve always wondered about but have never felt right purchasing anything from because I’m somehow averse to purchasing things to hold things I’ve purchased. It’s like buying a case for your laptop. You shell out $3000 for the computer (If you’re going to get a computer you might as well get a good one) and the thought of another $40 for a case is paralyzing.

Dear computer company (duh, Apple),

Here’s a tip: bundle MacBook Pro purchases with a case of the customers choosing.  Mention this on the price tag, add the extra $40 to the cost, and we won’t blink.  We’ll be ecstatic to have a case included.

Signed,

Someone who needs only the smallest nudge in justifying the purchase of pretty things.

As I cracked open the teal-covered Xetoc, a wave of panic flowed through my unexercised core.  Lines. There they were, marring every page of the otherwise perfect playground.  I looked around. Nobody in Michigan seemed to be bothered by my lines. Lines! On paper! I feel sick just thinking back to this morning, though I’m guessing that part of the current sick feeling has to do with my late lunch of ice cream and a buttered bagel, in that order.  I can’t function with lined paper. My thoughts are stifled by the endless stream of parallel, and my chicken scratch feels ashamed of the repetitive perfection.  Lines taunt me. Doodle on them and they are still there. Rotate the notebook 90 degrees and they form an impenetrable thought prison.

My day of anticipation triumphing over ambition ended at this very second.  The tactile “Hairball” combined with my love of teal and the consistently inspiring prototyping by Tom at Red Cover Studios sent me home determined to make right in this DIY world.  I sliced the teal cover off of what is now just an expensive stack of ugly scrap paper, and got to work measuring, folding, cutting, and sewing blank pages together, resetting them in the teal cover and inserting a leather binding as supple as the one on “Hairball.”

Deep breaths.

Now, I have a notebook I feel confident enough to use in public, and I’m going start in on “Hairball” until Hulu calls.

The offending lines are sliced out, and new, touch-happy pages are added with a bit of leather love along the binding.

In fact, I saw hundreds, maybe millions.  I was in the middle of an improv everywhere stunt, except the Republican canvassers didn’t sing show tunes, or freeze in place for five minutes.   They were real, and they all wore navy blue polo shirts and planted themselves at regular intervals down the central corridor of the Holland farmers market.

For a God time call...

I knew that this was a super-conservative area of the country, but as I walk around town, I find it hard to believe that the majority of people around me can tolerate the extra ten bars of volume of Fox News. I want to reach out and touch them and ask them to tell me why, but I think they’re telling me already.  I found a flyer on the ground next to my car today. Without my glasses I live in my own happy haze, and I saw it, thought “Great! Someone wants to have a good time! Me too!”  Then I picked it up.

I’ve never lived somewhere where religion defines the community.  For instance, last night I went to a bar to watch Michigan football with a couple folks I’ve met.  I sinned right off the bat by asking if it was University of or State, but was allowed to repent and followed along with the game, cheering when other people clapped, slapping my hands and yelling out a: “here we go” approximately every 7 minutes to keep up appearances.

I’m waiting for the iPhone app: how to be a sports fan when you already feel awkward for being the new person.  Think of it – tips about match-ups, key games, things to shout at bars.  I’m not thinking the boring statistics trivia either.  None of the: “this is the fourth highest ratio of players to fans at a game in the in the Midwest in the last 11 years.”  I can listen to a semi-circle of large men wearing earmuff headsets for no apparent reason if I need data.  I’m talking good, juicy information.  Tidbits that are entirely irrelevant to the game that I can weave into sentences with strangers.  “I’m so glad Jones doesn’t like tuna. I don’t like tuna either.  Go TEAM!”

The boys in blue at the farmers market were collecting signatures for congressman Pete Hoekstra’s (R-Michigan, headquarters 25 yards from my door) bid for governor.  Now, how many of you walk faster and prepare excuses and faux-polite ‘no thank yous’ in advance of seeing any sort of person with a clip board that might ask you to sign a petition of any sort?  These people are a nuisance, right? Wrong in Michigan.  People were lined up five deep to scribble on these clipboards.  It was the most non-presidential election excitement I have ever seen. I wanted to sign just so I could be part of something and yell, “Go TEAM!”

Too bad my teams weren’t playing.  I don’t mix my politics and religion, but I have no problem mixing design with business, or art with geology.  Why is this? As designers we know the power of leveraging one discipline with another.  A large portion of American conservatives have figured out the same.  Wow!  What are the qualities of a successful pairing of disciplines / disciples?  What two groups, when joined, could really make a difference in the world, tear it down, or make us laugh?

So yes, now I live amongst the people that voted for Bush, but they’ve inspired me in a way I didn’t see possible.

When I moved to Santa Cruz, CA in 2002 I made sure that everyone knew I was from Massachusetts.  I arrived on time, brought a bunch of sweaters and khaki pants, honked at pedestrians, and just in case anyone was left wondering, I dressed as a Masshole for Halloween.  A what? If you have to ask, you’ll never know.  That’s both the embedded Masshole in me talking, as well as the quote that was on the theme of my high school yearbook in 1994.  I became very self-aware in 1994.  My thick corduroy pants and chain wallet without the wallet complemented Counting Crows and the one-song gig of my band, Purple Karma.  It’s hard to be in a band if your musical contribution is via Suzuki violin because there are no rock songs that merge with Minuet in D.

My So-Called Life forever changed the complexity of television in 1994 and I thought that if I knew Clare Danes we might be friends, just as now I think that if I knew Diablo Cody, we would also be friends.  I doubt I’d ever get along with Sarah Jessica Parker, even though the characters she plays love shoes as much as I do, though by shoes I mean sneakers and she means Manolo Blahniks.

By my fourth year in Santa Cruz I had begun to arrive when I arrived, wear hoodies, ride a cruiser, and and have no problem participating in everyday impromptu parades.  Vans were my sneakers of choice.  Simple, blank canvases covered with a range of art, Vans should be the reference point for every usability engineer.  Consistent and predictable but with enough variety and edge so that you never know anyone that has the same pair that you have.  My Massachusetts friends accused me of being a Californian but I still honked at pedestrians.

wink wink - things are getting risque in downtown Holland

It’s 2009 now and I am afraid of Michigan. I don’t know what I’m going to look like in a month.  Two months.  If the people of downtown Holland are any measure, in a year I’ll look like a retiree.  Is there a raging subculture I have yet to find? A street of edgy stores?  What do Republicans wear to bed?

My teal Vans with white flowers have a hole, and somehow I transmitted floor polish to the inner soles, leaving me walking tentatively on slippery pucks as I people watch and try to guess an individuals political affiliation based on his or her outfit.  I love guessing the personal history of strangers.  My sister and I play this game to extremes and we get frustrated when other people refuse to show the same enthusiasm or prowess for pigeon holing.

I have a whole new crop of strangers to look at these days and this candy store is always open.  I know I’ll get used to this town and make it work just like you get used to having a small rock in your shoe and find a way to shake it into a tolerable place without having to remove your shoe.